Seven minutes that rearrange you

The sex scene between Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue Is the Warmest Color is the best sex I have ever seen. Not the best sex scene in film—the best sex, period, anywhere, including everything I’ve watched with my browser history set to forget and my standards calibrated accordingly.

Abdellatif Kechiche won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this film, and the scene is a significant part of why. It runs about seven minutes, it’s properly explicit, and none of that is really the point. What undoes you is the urgency—the specific physical grammar of two people who actually want each other, the kind of thing most screen sex deliberately avoids because it would be too much. This is too much. It’s exactly the right amount of too much.

Exarchopoulos does something here that stops looking like acting somewhere around the thirty-second mark. Seydoux holds a different energy—controlled, deliberate, completely present—and the tension between those two registers is what gives the scene its shape. They’re not performing desire; they’re showing you what it looks like when it’s genuine.

I watched it and immediately felt inadequate about every sexual experience I have ever had or am likely to have. I also felt a very strong and completely reasonable desire to be in the immediate vicinity of either a Léa Seydoux or an Adèle Exarchopoulos at the earliest possible opportunity. Whoever cast these two, then let Kechiche run the camera for seven uninterrupted minutes, deserves every prize in existence—from the Palme d’Or down to whatever certificate your local film society hands out at the Christmas potluck.

Going to think about this for a while. Possibly quite a while. Who wants to go first.